Beautiful Bali: Eat, Pray, Love on Julia Robert's mystical island

By Sarah Turner
Last updated at 9:59 AM on 23rd August 2010


Peaceful place to rejuvenate: The luxury spa facilities on the beach at Jimbaran Bay, Bali


Wayan Nuriayasih's restaurant in the Balinese city of Ubud feels more like a place of pilgrimage than a tourist destination. Wayan, a woman in her late 30s wearing a sarong and a sequined Super Mario T-shirt, asks me to stick my tongue out, and looks at my palm. There's good news and bad news, she says. I'll live for a long time, but two men will leave me for other women before I find love - and I shouldn't eat so many eggs.

A bewildering number of pills are placed on the table. These, she says, picking up a handful, will help with weight loss. Another set will improve my beauty. Wayan, who is hardly waif-like, swallows a couple of the weight-loss pills with a glass of water and a grin.

I notice that every so often, tourists, all of them female, hover on the threshold looking slightly envious... and I assume that in their back packs they all have a copy of the literary phenomenon Eat, Pray, Love. This bestselling memoir - and now Hollywood film - by Elizabeth Gilbert is like A Year In Provence, but with added mysticism and some extreme navel-gazing.

In her book, Gilbert tells the story of how, after getting divorced, she travels to Italy (where she eats a lot), then to India (where she prays a lot) and finally to Bali, where she falls in love, not only with the island but with Felipe, a Brazilian jewellery importer.

Since the book was published in 2006 (and Oprah raved about it on television), Bali has welcomed a steady stream of people hoping to 'find themselves'.

Julia Roberts went one step further and spent last year making the film version, travelling between Italy and India before on the island with her husband and three children.


Easy rider: Julia Roberts' character discovers relaxing Bali by bicycle in the film

It was a tricky production, with paparazzi in Rome and protests (about the filming upsetting village life) in both India and Bali to contend with, but in their final destination - where the largely Hindu population are said to spend a third of their day in worship - the family had a haven to retreat to.

During filming, the family stayed at the two Four Seasons hotels on the island. The resort in Jimbaran Bay is a study in seclusion, a series of villas set into the hillside. Elsewhere in the world, the Four Seasons hotel chain offers lashings of dependable, Westernstyle luxury, but here its hotels get into the Bali vibe, mixing minibars with meditation areas.

Spa options include mind-blowing reiki treatments and, after just a couple of days, it seems only appropriate that the hotel's Irish-born general manager combines the job with being a published poet.

It turns out that my villa is next to the one that Julia Roberts and family stayed in, and by peeking over the gate I could see a full-size swimming pool, an open-air dining room and a small army of sunloungers.


Idyllic: The secluded Jimbaran Bay resort


Cathy from Arizona is just back from seeing Ketut Liyer, charismatic healer Gilbert visits every day before Felipe arrives on the scene.

'He said that I'd live until I was 103 and that I'd marry the love of my life,' Cathy says.

Tia from California, who is taking time out from being a mortgage broker, looks a little nonplussed. 'He said the same thing to me,' she says.

'How did you get to see him?' I ask.

'It's easy,' says Cathy in an earnest way. 'Every taxi driver knows where he lives.'

'What about Wayan?' I ask.

In Eat, pray, Love, Gilbert tells how she raised money to enable Wayan, an impoverished single mother, to build a home and restaurant.

'It's just around the corner but she's never there,' says Cathy. Indeed, the blogosphere is awash with 'EPL' fans who have turned to Wayan's restaurant/clinic for some healing massage and divine intervention as a way of finding the perfect boyfriend, only to find that she is off to the temple, or is too busy to see them.

I understand their problem - when I arrived on Bali, Wayan didn't answer my emails and there was no reply when I called the number for her given in the Lonely planet guidebook.

However, the concierge of the Four Seasons is made of sterner stuff, and three hours later I have an appointment with her.

My consultation involves being scrubbed with bits of vegetation by three teenage boys who act as Wayan's assistants.

Later she comes upstairs, applies heated metal rollers (Gilbert never mentioned these) and jabs her fingers into my armpits, saying 'accept the pain' while an assistant attacks the side of my toes with a metal stylus. I start to wonder if Gilbert had been rather too economical with the truth.

As I inwardly curse EPL, Wayan explains that she had to change her mobile phone number because she was getting so many requests for appointments.


In demand: Healer Ketut Liyer is interviewed by a film crew at his Balinese home

Covered in paste (which is not a good look), I head downstairs for a shower and eat a meal that Wayan has prepared while she gets changed. There's a television crew in town, she explains, who want to interview her.

On my last day, after examining a newly acquired bruise in my armpit and feeling scrubbed to within an inch of my life, it's time to visit Ketut, a gentle 80-year-old, who meditates, paints and - by all accounts - offers a rather gentler healing experience. I hire a taxi and the driver tells me I have a good aura as we drive through the rice fields on the outskirts of Ubud. I marvel at Bali's beauty and I decide that I love this island.

Ketut's home is in a traditional Balinese family compound made up of a series of intricately carved wooden houses built on small stilts. Chickens scratch about while, on a veranda, I see Ketut.

He beams at me, but it becomes clear that I probably won't be told my fortune by him today. He's somewhat busy; there's a film crew in town...

Gettting there
Elegant Resorts (01244 897515, www.elegantresorts.co.uk) has three nights at the Four Seasons Bali at Jimbaran Bay, accommodation only, and three nights at the Four Seasons Resort Bali at Sayan in a suite on a bed-and-breakfast basis starting at £2,290 per person, including flights and transfers.

Karma is good at home of temples and shrines
By Wendy Gomersall
About 150,000 Britons visit Indonesia every year, despite Foreign Office travel advice warning there is a high threat of terrorism in the country. For most, the chief lure is Bali, despite the terrorist attacks there in 2002 and 2005.

The very name conjures up images of exquisite stone temples, rice terraces, humid forests full of lush green plants, volcanoes and serene, smiling people.

With some 20,000 temples and shrines, it's no wonder Bali is called the Island of the Gods. Most of Indonesia's population is Muslim but 93 per cent of Bali's residents practise Balinese Hinduism, a blend of Indian Hinduism, Buddhism and animism. It is this exotic mix that draws the spiritually curious, such as Elizabeth Gilbert.

Just 100 miles wide and 70 miles north to south, Bali is a laid-back playground with the young whizzing around on scooters and staying in basic B&B accommodation. But if budget isn't your bag, Bali also has a number of top-notch resorts. Orient-Express hotels' Jimbaran

Puri Bali and Ubud Hanging Gardens offer a great twin-centre holiday.

The newly refurbished Jimbaran sits on one of the island's best beaches, while the jungle retreat of Ubud is a 90-minute drive from Jimbaran with the journey providing a great opportunity to look at real Bali. In the countryside, paddy fields are still cultivated by hand and families live in compounds complete with their own mini-temples.

Getting there
Audley Travel can arrange a 14-day holiday in Bali, with six nights at Jimbaran Puri Bali and five nights at Ubud Hanging Gardens, from £2,285pp, including flights and transfers. Upgrade to a pool villa at Jimbaran for £500pp. Call 01993 838 110 or visit www.audleytravel.com.





source :dailymail